Best jQuery Plugins of 2010

For our “Best of 2010” series we’ve already shown your our picks for best free WordPress themes and free fonts. So for this week the focus in on jQuery. This javascript framework continued to grow in popularity during 2010, which meant an abundance of plugins being released. This made it difficult to choose our favorites. We made a conscious effort to choose from a variety of types, and ones that were useful to web designers and that had some wow factor. Here are our picks for the Best jQuery Plugins of 2010.

Reorder and filter items with a nice shuffling animation. Just specify source container and destination collection which will replace the source collection. New elements will appear with fancy scaling+alpha effect, deleted elements (non-existant in destination collection) will scale out and rearranged items will move to their destination positions.

Masonry is a layout plugin for jQuery. Think of it as the flip side of CSS floats. Whereas floating arranges elements horizontally then vertically, Masonry arranges elements vertically then horizontally according to a grid. The result minimizes vertical gaps between elements of varying height, just like a mason fitting stones in a wall.

gvChart is a plugin for jQuery, that uses Google Charts to create interactive visualization by using data from the HTML table tag. It is easy in use and additionally it allows you to create five types of the charts.

When working with imagery online keeping the integrity of an images aspect ratio is as important as anything else. This is what’s so nice about this jQuery plug-in; you don’t have to worry about all of your images being perfectly sized for this slider. The jQuery Image Scale Carousel auto scales all of your images making implementation super simple.

YoxView is a free Lightbox-type media and image viewer jQuery plugin. It’s easy to use and feature-rich. You can use it to display a variety of media, such as: images, video, inline content, iframes, Flash and more.